Seems like my problem is back, and I'm once again scratching my head over this one:

In a "raw" basic install of LMDE XFCE I have conky giving me a black background as in the screenshot above. Then I installed dropbox from the Linux Mint repos, and with it I also got nautilus-dropbox. After that it seems like Conky finally gets transparent, but I suspect that nautilius has something to do with that. Anyway - I'm not sure I'm happy with Dropbox pulling in Nautilus and yet another 10MB of RAM, so I started all over again - and behold - I lost transparency.

So - how do I get my transparency in LMDE XFCE without messing with nautilus? Or am I wrong in my suspicions? Is there something else at play here?

Seeing that one of them leads to #! - a community from where I have only good experiences - I decided to begin there. An it did indeed help me get my transparency back.

I did end up with a new "problem" though, and that is that while the static stuff in my Conky are ok the dynamic ones (cpu load, uptime) seem out of sync and flickers when they change "value". (Not really flickering - more like the new value gets written on top of the "disappearing" old one)

I tried manipulate the double_buffer value, and also update_interval but none of them seem to change that behavior. First I thought I'd blame the computer for not being able to cope with the "stress" of it all, but since I've never seen this problem before (had conky running a year in a previous install of LMDE, and it's also behaved well in both LM13 LXDE and in #!) I'm thinking it's gotta be something else. Anyway - I suppose that is a problem for another thread, my initial issue is however solved.